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Hostile Woolworth Building sign in its customary location, guarding the building’s Broadway entrance.

Above is the sign that used to stand at the Broadway entrance to the landmark Woolworth Building. I noticed it back in September when I attended an office warming party for architect Jim Biber who now works out of a creamy white minimalist space on the building’s 20th floor. The party was great,

My story about the city of the future, which wound up mostly being about Almere in the Netherlands, is in the current issue of Travel + Leisure. And while Almere, founded in the 1970s, is an extraordinary open-air museum exhibiting successive decade’s visionary schemes, it leaves something to be desired as a city.

The view of Lower Manhattan from Fort Jay on Governors Island and the view of Ground Zero from the 46th floor of 7WTC.

Initially my interest in stillspotting nyc, a project by the Guggenheim Museum, was motivated by the research I’ve done for my book on silence. My sense is that finding reservoirs of silence within the city is more essential than going off to some remote,

What I’ve noticed in recent days is that a lot of people have found my website by searching for 9-11 photos. I don’t have any. I prefer to commemorate the life of the World Trade Center, rather than its death. I prefer to remember the Twin Towers as an out-sized architectural conceit that, by the time of its destruction,

the transfinite by Ryoji Ikeda at the Park Avenue Armory (top) and Rainbow City by Friends With You near the High Line (bottom).

In part because Travel + Leisure asked me to figure out what the term “city of the future” might mean at this juncture (see the upcoming October issue) and in part because Metropolis asked me to review Talk to Me at MoMA (in the September issue,

The Korean New York Presbyterian Church of Queens. (Photo by Archidose.)

Yesterday morning, I glanced at the weekly email newsletter from The Architect’s Newspaper and saw Doug Garofalo’s name. Without really reading the headline, I clicked on the link and was stunned to find myself staring at his obituary.

Back in 2003, I began the 14,000 mile road trip for my book, The Perfect $100,000 House, at a two week intensive workshop on designing and building houses at a school in Vermont called Yestermorrow. The formula was simple; in the morning we learned to design and in the afternoon we learned to build.

At long last, the debut of my airport critic column appeared in the May issue of Travel + Leisure. Sadly, it’s not going to run as often as I would like and the first one, about Copenhagen’s sweet new budget airline terminal, shrank markedly from its assigned length. Arguably, nothing essential is missing, just gobs of detail.

Last night on Greene Street, this truck covered with words by artist Barbara Kruger was parked for a few hours. It was about to depart for Kansas City, the first stop on a long road trip cooked up by painter Eric Fischl and his crew. The project, America Now and Here,